By Alex Zhai
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Tuesday, April 11, 2006, The OG, news

This Friday the president — University of Illinois President Joseph White, that is — will take a tour of Uni. According to Director/Principal Kathleen Patton, the school has been trying to arrange such a tour for almost a year, and White's visit was finally set up six months ago.

The purpose, Patton says, is to get the U of I president better acquainted with Uni in general, and no specific topics are scheduled to be discussed.

White will briefly visit classes at random during fourth period. Then, in order to get a more personal view of the school, he will have lunch in the North Attic with 12 to 15 students, invited by Patton to represent the different components of Uni's population.

White, 58, became the U of I's 16th president on Jan. 31, 2005. He oversees the university's system of three campuses: Chicago, Springfield, and Urbana-Champaign. (Chancellor Richard Herman is the chief executive officer of the Urbana-Champaign campus.) White, who spent almost three decades at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has never been to Uni.

“It's unusual for a university to have a high school on campus,” says Patton. “I hope that President White will become a little more familiar with Uni High and what actually goes on here … so he will gain an appreciation for Uni and what we contribute to the university.”